TERRY MAROTTA: Turning the tables, wondering what the animal kingdom thinks of us

Sunday

Jun 28, 2009 at 12:01 AMJun 28, 2009 at 3:41 PM

The birds have the perspective. The ones wheeling above my house know me better than I know myself: “She wonders why her spirits sag at afternoon’s end when even a bat can see she lives in a hollow; her whole house in shadow by 4 p.m.!”

I like that about birds, how they have that larger view of things.

I like squirrels too, who are always so STUNNED! and AMAZED! when they dart out from under a bush and see these fleshy hairless giants on the lawn chairs.

“We’re not alone! What a SHOCK! What an unlooked-for development!” It can be the same squirrel coming upon the same lolling giants every day and still he is stunned.

But that’s what I like about squirrels: how much like us they are, never learning, never anticipating, always assuming things will go on as before and vinyl records and VCRs will be with us always.

I like them for this naive and optimistic quality.

But the ones I like most? More than the squirrels, who fear me? More than the birds, who only know me by the top of my head as I move in my unimaginative vectors to and from the house?

I like the mice because they live right here with me. Residents of my very kitchen, they know all about me: About the box of bran bought back in the early ’90s and still untouched. About the potato chip crumbs lining that top shelf.

Whatever my faults they still choose and befriend me. They appreciate my pantry in ways no one else does.

And I feel just awful to have to cancel their lease.

But just yesterday a person newly arrived on our shores told me it’s the mice or my health.

“Their pee-pee!” he exclaimed, using the term so commonly heard these days. “It will kill you!”

He recommends a deadly concoction that dries the mousies out post-mortem, so there’s no dead-mouse smell.

Another person speaks of a kind of sticky rug that stops them in their tracks.

And my pals at the hardware store point to the classic wooden mousetrap, which you can buy for a buck, bait with peanut-butter-coated string and boom, the next morning there’s your wee tenant, a tenant no longer.

It is then that you actually see the creature for the first time, and regard with sorrow the delicate perfection of his small form: The tiny feet. The little tail. The guillotined neck you can hardly bear to look upon.

If you’re like me, you feel a certain sharp nostalgia for an era you don’t even remember. A time, say, when pee-pee and related matter was prized as fertilizer, as it still is in China where, under the name “night soil,” it proudly stands as the inspiration for a patriotic song. (Sick of “The Star Spangled Banner”? Try having to sing “The Night Soil Gatherers Are Coming Down from the Mountain” at the start of a few ballgames!)

I once read a book called “The Year 1000” that describes an era when people brought their animals right indoors with them nights, the better to look after and tend them. I know that as recently as the 1890s my own family had a cow named Mary, whom they mourned mightily when she went off in a wagon to be made into pot roast.

We can think what we like about the creatures all around us but the real question remains: What on EARTH must they be thinking of US?